Techung
Lee, PhD, leader of the study and associate professor of biochemistry
and biomedical engineering in the School of Medicine and Biomedical
Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at
University at Buffalo, along with his team, has genetically altered
mesenchymal stem cells in an effort to grow
adult stem cells for clinical purposes.

The
problem with using mesenchymal stem cells that are not genetically
altered is that they have a short life span in lab cultures. When
using these mesenchymal stem cells, doctors and scientists must
continuously replenish the samples in order to use fresh, new stem
cells. But the stem cells come from bone marrow donors, and the need
to use new samples all the time can be difficult, time-consuming and
expensive.

But
now, the University at Buffalo researchers have engineered new cell
lines that they are calling "MSC Universal," which work
exactly like normal mesenchymal stem cells, but do not age in lab
cultures.

"Our
stem cell research is application-driven," said Lee. "If
you want to make stem cell therapies feasible, affordable and
reproducible, we know you have to overcome a few hurdles. Part of the
problem in our health care industry is that you have a treatment, but
it often costs too much. In the case of stem
cell treatments, isolating stem cells is very expensive. The
cells we have engineered grow continuously in the laboratory, which
brings down the price of treatments."

In
addition, Lee's discovery will consist of injecting the altered
mesenchymal stem cells directly into skeletal muscle, which is a
"less invasive procedure" than have the cells injected
right into the damaged organ. Lee has also proved that this type of
injection improves heart chamber function and reduces scar tissue.

But
the creation of ageless stem cells isn't the only hot news that could
make stem cells clinically-friendly. Researchers from the Centenary
Institute, the University of Sydney and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
have to stretch
stem cell growth, allowing the number of blood-forming stem cells
to increase. To do this, researchers replicated the environment where
stem cells live inside the body, mixed cell hormones with
tropoelastin, which is a new elastic-like substance, to coat the
plates where the stem cells were grown, and then allowed the stem
cells to pull on the stretchy surface, expanding the number of cells
by up to three times more than traditional methods. This
particular study was published in the journal Nature
Biotechnology.

"Our
research has, for the first time, successfully demonstrated that
physical forces created by elasticity play a key role in
blood-forming cell growth and may mimic the environment of stem cells
inside our body," said Professor John Rasko, Centenary Institute
Head of Gene and Stem Cell Therapy. "What we've discovered is
that blood-forming stem cells like it to be super stretchy because,
like a cat on a sofa, they like to pull on their environment."

By
both expanding the number of stem cells used and creating ageless
mesenchymal stem cells, researchers are coming closer to allowing
these cells to be used clinically because these two new discoveries
make it cheaper and easier for people to utilize.